Wir mussen die Nation ausrotten!

Baseball has been a bit undersold at With Leather, so I’ve decided to take a break from nonstop webcomics and professional wrestling to remedy the problem. Unfortunately nobody likes to read about baseball, because it is boring and not football, so you kinda have to coax people into clicking the link and consolidate everything into concise blurbs, preferably featuring a 65 x 90 picture of Buster Olney. That guy really knows his stuff. Did you realize how important On Base Percentage is?

Anyway, Baseball is Boring is the column to read if you want to kinow what happened this weekend, but you don’t want to know badly enough to find out at a reputable news source. Also, you don’t want to Google “Barry Bonds steroids” in quotes.

Kinsler and Cruz break every record, all at once.

The Texas Rangers’ Ian Kinsler and Nelson Cruz made history by becoming the first set of teammates to homer in each of the first three games of a season on Sunday, closing out a sweep of the Red Sox. The duo set a number of records, because we live in a society that puts things like “most copies sold on Game Boy” in the Guinness Book of World Records.

Here’s the queick list: Kinsler and Cruz came into the game as one of only six teammates to homer in each of the first two games of the season, and Kinsler became the first player to hit a lead-off homer in the first two. Cruz’s homer was the second by a right-handed batter to reach the upper deck in right field at Rangers Ballpark. ESPN set a record by mentioning Cliff Lee for no reason in 100 of their first 100 stories about the Texas Rangers, and the Red Sox became the first team to make me laugh out loud in real life in 2011.

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The Barry Bonds perjury trial is heating up, and we’ve finally reached the point where the prosecution wants to know about Barry Bonds’ balls, back-ne, and hat size.

She testified that, at one point, he had “a big lump … [that] looked awful” in his elbow. Bonds told her that steroid use caused the muscle and tendons to outgrow the joint. “It blew out,” she said. She also said that Bonds talked about the widespread use of steroids among baseball players. “He mentioned that other players do it and that’s how they got ahead, that’s how they achieved,” Bell said.

Bell testified to changes in Bonds’ physical condition, saying that his sexual performance declined and that his testicles shrank. He developed acne on his back and grew (and shaved) chest hair, according to Bell.

–WaPo.

Bonds’ hat size also grew an eighth of an inch over nine years. That doesn’t sound like a big deal, especially when dude is shaving his chest and watching his own testicles shrivel into oblivion. Did Bonds also start carrying a purse? Buying copious quantities of black shoes? Because that’s the only way I’ll care. Everyone know that Bonds was on some kind of juice, and yet no one can prove it. Having tiny nuts doesn’t amount to perjury, which has to be an enormous relief for Brett Favre.

But you know who has a huge head? Placido Polanco. That dude’s a walking Veggie Tale.

Barry Bonds is on trial for perjury in one of the biggest sports story of the year (and of the last two years, and of the next three). Bonds played for the Pirates for a while, so unless you really want to read comedy based around “we signed some young prospects, and they’re hitting like .250 in single-A, so we’re just gonna wait and see how that turns out” you’ll have to take this as your Spring Training Dugout.

The truth about Bonds is similar to the truth about Clemens. I think they both knew what they were doing, but are so delusional after decades of being deified and conversely judged that they can’t ever truly or morally understand what they’re doing. I think Barry Bonds is the type of guy who goes to the bathroom, comes out, washes his hands, takes five steps down the hall and starts wondering whether or not he needs to go to the bathroom. He can just also hit 7,000 home runs.

Today’s Dugout follows. Your comments are appreciated, as long as they aren’t in the third person. Brandon Stroud hates comments in the third person.

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Opening statements for the Barry Bonds perjury trial in U.S. District Court are scheduled to be heard today, and I’ll speak for the majority of America when I make an underhanded fist about navel-high and shake it dismissively. The lynchpin in the case for the feds is the testimony of Greg Anderson, who served as Bonds’s personal trainer while he was cracking home runs into McCovey Cove.

Along with the swearing in of the jury and opening statements, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston is expected to send the jurors out of the courtroom Tuesday so she can send Bonds’ former personal trainer Greg Anderson to jail.

Illston told Anderson on March 1 that she plans to have him kept in custody for the length of the trial if he follows through as expected on his vow of silence. Anderson’s attorney, Mark Geragos, said he will argue that Anderson can’t be jailed on contempt charges because he already served a little more than a year on similar charges after refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating Bonds.

–The AP.

The trial is expected to last two to four weeks, and jurors have been ordered explicitly to not discuss the trial on the internet. Hi, jurors! But now I feel like I know how some people felt during the OJ trial, because this seems like a big waste of time, especially since Bonds’s alleged perjury occurred in sealed testimony that never should have been leaked to the public. Hey, the guy hit 73 home runs in a season! I don’t care how shriveled up his balls might be.

So the federal prosecution in this Barry Bonds case wants to show his presumably-shrunken testicles as evidence that he took performance-enhancing drugs during his baseball career. Hey, I’ve got premature baldness and tiny junk and no one ever accused me of being on steroids.

The defense derided the science and studies that Bowers and the government cited that allege steroid and human growth hormone use by Bonds would have been witnessed by a former girlfriend, teammates and others in the form of physical symptoms: shrunken testicles, male pattern baldness, and a giant skull and fingers.[...]

Visual inspection apparently won’t do. Ruby noted that a “layperson” would have difficulty detecting diminished testicles “even by touch.”

The only reliable means of measurement, Ruby wrote, is by a “trained examiner” using a special device called an orchidometer.

What good would this do? Do we have any idea of what Bonds’ testicles looked like before he started juicing? I don’t understand why anyone could think this is a good idea. Hopefully Bonds’ balls will just plead the fifth. That’s why they put that in the Constitution, you know. No man should be incriminated by his own scrotum.

[Y! News, who provides testicle updates every hour, on the hour]

went to court today to plead not guilty to stuff he's very obviously guilty of, which comes as no surprise seeing as how he's lied about not doing steroids he very obviously did.  Wait, I wrote that sentence wrong.  I meant to put "allegedly" somewhere in there.  Fucking lawyers. 

The home run king's arraignment in U.S. District Court marked his first public appearance since a Nov. 15 indictment charging him with four counts of perjury and one of obstruction of justice. If he's convicted of all five charges Bonds could spend more than two years in prison.

Translation: he won't be convicted of all five charges, and he'll never see the inside of a prison.  Ooh, unless he's been to Alcatraz!  If he spent all those years in San Francisco and never went, it's his loss.  What an educational tour.  It's so crazy to look at the old cells and think, "Wow, just imagine all the ass rape that happened here."